Optimizing Medical Imaging Systems for Estimation Tasks

描述(由申请人提供)： 这项研究的目的是建立一个严格的理论和实验框架，以便在所讨论的任务是与医学相关的评估任务时，对图像质量进行客观评估。我们建议应用这个框架来比较我们的合作者正在开发的特定SPECT(单光子发射计算机断层扫描)成像系统的不同配置，并优化该系统的参数。我们将专注于定位小肿瘤或其他病灶对象(如前哨淋巴结)的任务，以及估计综合肿瘤活动性的任务。我们设想了为特定任务优化的系统开发的三个阶段，例如肿瘤位置估计。第一阶段是对整个系统进行仿真，确定最优参数。第二个阶段是通过构建一个小型系统并将其用于幻影或小动物成像研究来验证设计。最后一个阶段是建立一个完整的人体研究系统。我们提议的工作将开发解决这一过程的第一阶段的方法，并将导致能够设计最大限度地提高观察者在评估任务中的性能的医学成像系统。在第二阶段，我们将使用新设计的体模和来自小动物SPECT系统的实验数据，将这些方法应用于估计肿瘤位置和综合肿瘤活性的任务。在本提案中，我们将不涉及系统优化的第三阶段。我们将以一般的数学意义来处理评估任务，这将使我们能够迅速将我们的工作扩展到其他成像方式(包括人体成像系统)和其他评估任务，而不会遇到困难。最终，这项研究将产生改善患者诊断和治疗的成像系统。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of the proposed research is to develop a rigorous theoretical and experimental framework for the objective assessment of image quality when the tasks in question are medically relevant estimation tasks. We propose to apply this framework to compare different configurations of a specific SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) imaging system being developed by our collaborators and to optimize the parameters of this system. We will focus on the task of locating small tumors or other focal objects such as sentinel lymph nodes and the task of estimating integrated tumor activity. We envision three stages in the development of a system optimized for a specific task such as tumor-location estimation. The first stage is the simulation of the entire system to determine optimal parameters. The second stage is the validation of the design by building a small system and using it for phantom or small-animal imaging studies. The final stage is to build a full-sized system for human studies. The work we propose will develop methods for addressing the first stage in this process and will result in the ability to design medical imaging systems that maximize observer performance on estimation tasks. For the second stage, we will apply these methods to the tasks of estimating tumor location and integrated tumor activity using newly designed phantoms and experimental data from a small-animal SPECT system. We will not address the third stage of system optimization in this proposal. We will treat estimation tasks in a general, mathematical sense that will allow us to rapidly extend our work to other imaging modalities (including human imaging systems) and to other estimation tasks without difficulty. Ultimately, this research will result in imaging systems that improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients.